I've just had an evil idea. Imagine me rubbing my hands together and chortling, as per above, with final H optional. Well, strictly speaking I had it in the shower at the gym, where chortling aloud would have made people stare at me funny, but I'm chortling now. Thank you, Rev Dodgson, for that verb.

This is the sort of idea that requires silence from me in re: evil plans from here out, but silence is difficult for me. Argh!

Cups of coffee so far today: 1.

Fandom itself: Did anybody else enjoy fandomsecrets's 1000th post yesterday? It was cheering to see all those happy secrets. There was a lovely Uther/Morgana secret, though no Giles squee. I fell down on that one; shoulda done one.

The power of procrastination is awesome, my friends: I've finished two stories that have been sitting in my fic pile incomplete for months, merely to avoid working on my main summer_of_giles project. At least I'll have something to post. It is the month of genfic for me, it seems.

I am once again stopping myself from commenting on remix stories lest I accidentally reveal which one I wrote, though I keep starting to write feedback. Nobody has any guesses about the remix I wrote, which amuses me because I think it's a sore thumb. But then, we all know our own styles better than anybody else knows them. My remixee seems to have liked it, which is a huge relief and almost the only thing that matters. There's something more personal about Remix that makes pleasing one's recipient more urgent than usual. We're tinkering with each other's babies.

( Joyous fizzing about remixes and the many worlds of fanfiction behind the cut... )

Yeah, I've kinda been in a progressively better mood every day recently. Brace yourselves for more good cheer.

( Is Who costuming a spoiler? Cut just in case... )

I was thinking (a dangerous yet fortunately rare occurrence) about the recent fandom go-round about warnings, which is iteration #392 in what is likely an endless culture clash. If you want to catch up on the thrash, check out metafandom's warnings tag. In this post I share the evolution of my own thinking about warnings, and a decision I've taken because of this most recent discussion.

( Fic warnings and tags... )

Fic archives I have freshly backed up:
Giles Writers' Zone
Riposte
Bodice Ripper
the LIST (BG)

On my list to do later today:
[ list completed; next step is by-hand spot-checking the mirrors ]

Archives I'm too late to save:
HeadQuarters

I'll snag Of Demons & Destiny when it reappears, which it should do soon. I already have the BuffyGiles archive content in zip form, and a mandate to reformat it all. (Which I will do one of these years, really.) It's preferable to get site source from admins directly, and not have to spider pages generated by software. But that's better than nothing.

What should I add to my list?

I'm doing nothing more complicated than running wget -m -p -k -np, which is something you can easily do yourselves if you want to join me in paranoia. I find the work done by West Wing Fanfiction Central inspirational here. I've maintained a stable presence on the web since 1994, so I think I can do a reasonable job of giving abandoned archives a new home. Absent a tragic steamroller accident, that is. There's also the looming threat of zombie attack. But we are all vulnerable to such tragedies.

Okay, have thought through some things and have some new policies! Translation: I threw darts at a board and now have a new idea that will live a week until it's replaced by the new idea.

Some observations aka wild overgeneralizations:
Everybody's claimed their forty acres and a mule, but nobody's farming yet. Everybody's waiting for the bellwether. I'm not in the mood to be the bellwether. As with every fannish migration, some people don't want to move at all. I don't want to lose those people. Wow, that's a lot of agricultural metaphors for one paragraph!

I'm going to crosspost only the fannish stuff I think has longevity to the dread other fannish journaling service that is either our new utopia or a new mirage, nobody can decide which. My theory is that conversation here is of this time and place, and fairly uninteresting elsewhere, especially given that LJ is unlikely to belly-up without a year of warning. I'll crosspost fic only, so when/if the DW rainbow unicorns arrive, the important things will already be there. This means I have to delete all the non-fic posts I copied over there. Procrastination!

I'm going to nuke my InsaneJournal account and leave a pointer behind.

Then I'm going to nap. Why not nap first?

A short unscientific poll of the flist on the topic of that Other Fannish Journaling Service that metafandomwank is busy wanking about right now. The goal is to figure out how annoyed you'd all be if I moved over there.

( You know what the cut's for... )

So, hey, I'm over there on Dreamwidth. If I had to pick one thing the DW fork of LJ has that's worth the time, it's the separation of the concepts of "following" and "friending". They call following "subscribing" and friending "granting access", which are also fine terms for the concepts. This reframing might reduce drama by, I dunno, 36.42% at the least.

Have just been re-pondering the feasibility of modifying iJournal to crosspost. The trouble is, mostly, that the account and login stuff in iJournal is a global variable mess; would need to be refactored to handle more than one. Though, huh, shouldn't be that hard. Just a matter of slogging. Should also write local caching for user icons, so they don't have to get downloaded over and over. The nice thing about the stupid journal backup hack is that I now have some clues about how to use the LJ api. (Also, I definitely wish to fix the bug where it displays jpegs with wack-ass pixel density settings at the DPI the image requests. Which is usually not the DPI the user wants. If the app isn't drawing 10,000 pixels, something's wrong.)

We had a little BSG marathon last night. We've now watched the first five episodes of season 1, as well as the introductory miniseries. Mr Pedia approves. "This is classic Campbellian survival horror!" Lots of the classic SF stuff I love here, in fact, expressed in solid writing. After Mr P said that, he fled the room, a sure sign that he's engaged so much with the show that he can't take the emotions any more.

Constrict: Could somebody who knows what's what confirm for me that Constrict is July 10-12, same hotel in Vegas as last year? I also need to drag myself to the Yahoo Group to search & find out how much it is. (The organizer hasn't responded to my email, but I want some kind of confidence before I schedule vacation. Though I guess my mangler would be mellow.)

Random: Spotted yesterday: an Aston Martin DB5. This video of the James Bond movie gun-barrel sequences came to mind.

Dear Giles or ASH fic archivists--
If you're losing interest in fandom or wandering off to another life or having trouble keeping up your archives, please just dump all the data on me. I'll give your archives a home. No questions asked.
sincerely yours,
is deeply grateful for those stories and doesn't want them to vanish

Random: It's the 45th anniversary of Terry Riley's "In C", and Metafilter has a spectacular roundup of performances and links about the piece. If you pick one to listen to, pick Bang on a Can's version. I love BoaC for their Music for Airports cover as well.

I am confidently informed in a private message that my fandom is creepy but my ljmigrate tool works. Heh. You keep on being charming to strangers, random LJ person.

Though really, we're enough like slow-boiled frogs that we forget the external perspective, which is in part the source of the trouble in the original mess of journal deletions a couple of summers ago. Consider this item linked on metafandom today, a straightforward discussion of how to approach an initially impossible-looking ficathon assignment. Practical, cheerful, and you can imagine it turning somebody's hair white if they tripped over it by accident.

I find my own hobby puzzling sometimes.

Pardon. I'm off to watch a lot of Top Gear with my husband, who laughs hysterically at Jeremy Clarkson. The shots of lovely curvy roads have been making me miss motorcycling. I think I might drive across the country this summer to go to WriterCon or something, thus combining creepy hobbies into one creeptastic high-speed road trip.

Star Trek: my first fandom.
Doctor McCoy: my first fandom crush.
Star Trek: the latest movie trailer.

It's obviously a serious re-write of the previous series canon, and more things blow up than ever blew up before. Zachary Quinto is shockingly Nimoy-ish, though of course his voice is all wrong. It's not yet clear to me it'll be good, but it is clear that I'll be parked in a seat on opening night or very soon thereafter.

How about you?

Sitting on my desk at work right now: two bottles of Four Roses bourbon (single barrel and small batch) and a bottle of Bruichladdich. Am bummed because I have them because a coworker is moving to Canada suddenly. SURPRISE CANADIANS! Sigh.

I just caused my fic archive tool to generate this sortable story index listing, but I'm pretty much convinced it's useless. You can talk me out of that if you wish.

9000 words of story written for posting Saturday, and I probably need another 6K followed by revision to reach some point where I'm happy with it all. There are some good bits in there. But why does everything I write these days become an exploration of loss or grief? Oh. Right. Never mind. But it is somewhat annoying when all I set out to write was some frivolous prawn.

Also, wank: see this and this. There are a lot of people out there on the net whose minds do not run in straight lines, and it can take a while to see enough to realize this about them. This person is definitely in the non-Euclidean geometry camp. Avoid. Take the advice given in the two posts I link to. There's more on metafandom if you have some free time to burn.

I have banninated because I don't want to show up in that person's friends listing. Grr.

This will end up linked all over the place, but I add my pointer to the lot anyway: synecdochic's project is kicked off. I'd call this a credible project with a real chance of providing fandom's next home. I'll be watching to see how I can help.

Somebody turns out to be insane enough to do it!

Jolly me out of my current state of rage, please. Rage is not a usual state for me-- not honest-to-goodness grand-gesture-level fury-- and I find it unpleasant. I'm against continuing in this state. Therefore, distraction! On the theory that if there's anything as comforting as self-absorption, it's contemplating the characters I love, I propose the following:

Ask me questions about fandom and fic and writing and stuff. I'll answer 'em, possibly by makin' stuff up.

This is pretty much what went through my mind when all the kerfluffles happened last summer. I've only gotten around to expressing it coherently now. I continue to think about it because the project is tempting: I look at fanfiction.net and I see a terrible archive platform; I look at LJ and I see an even worse one. But today seems like a great day to post, so here it is now: ( Why fandom won't leave LJ until LJ collapses. )

But you know what? synecdochic might have something going. And I'd call that project team sufficiently skillful and experienced to have success with running a serious site, forking LJ, and moving the user experience forward. Hypothetically. Good. I'm there.

Actually, what I think fanfiction peeps should do here on LJ is adopt a code-name interest that we can all list on our profiles.

Keys are:
* Spell it exactly the same way everybody else does. No "fanfic" vs "fanfiction" vs "fan fiction" variations.
* Choose something inoffensive and unconnected with anything. An oblique joke.
* No, really. Resist the temptation to go political with it. Stay Dada.

"i can has peach?" or something like that. Though maybe that's too clearly a reference to something. There's always red pandas. How can anybody dislike red pandas? Or censor them?

But really, guys. Fandom has to move. Where are the SMOFs? I wanna have a chat. And sigh, I should probably post that essay in public now, though I'm very short on conclusions, motivations, energy, and the will to run a project myself.

ETA: HA. Read this comment. See also the revision history for the relevant file. Am browsing the source now to attempt to confirm. Hilarious inadvertent effect of an attempt at filtering user names from the interest list, if true. Except NO. Have just looked at the source, and I concur with foxfirefey: they have a canned list they were nuking. Where they got the canned list is another question.

Well hey! It's my second anniversary here on LJ! That means the second anniversary of my decision to get involved in Buffy fandom. Not quite the second anniversary of my decision to start writing fanfiction-- that would be in April, according to the file creation date.

I marked this occasion by uploading some new icons. Because yay, more icon slots!

Already today I have done some woodworking, preceded by time spent cleaning up after Mr Pedia's aborted rail gun project, which left the garage looking as if... as if somebody's rail gun project had exploded in it. I took one look at the coils of magnet wire and said, "You were building a rail gun, weren't you," at which he looked abashed. He redeemed himself, however, by cleverly tying knots in rope so that my wood object could be hung in mid-air while I rubbed tung oil into it. Woot. Eagle Scouts come in handy every now and then. I think I'll keep mine, despite his epic inability to put tools away after using them.

Okay, now I go write Giles/Xander smut involving a desk chair. Wish them luck!

I made-- forced! at gunpoint!-- gileswench show me a lot of Due South, and we admired Paul Gross's ass acting. Fraser is just such a fabulous character. If you love Corporal Carrot, you will love Fraser. RayV's kvetching is adorable as well. I nearly snorted the Wench's fabulous berry pie through my nose several times while watching. Much love.

Mr Pedia and I caught up on Torchwood tonight. Well, it's science fiction. On television. Not just the usual fantasy-plus-lasers crap we get. There is, if not actual rejoicing, at least appreciation from Mr Pedia. I loathe and enjoy all the characters by turns, though I suppose Gwen comes in for the least loathing. And wait, Toshiko has been pretty great this season. Okay, I loathe all the male characters on Torchwood. Gwen/Tosh slash nao plz.

Look! Heroes action figures! I might need to have Hiro and Mohinder on my desk at work.

And that concludes this evening's exercise in fannish shallowness. Now I go write h/c prawn. Wait. That's shallow too.

Having now learned the fannish meaning of "smarm", have urge to write it. Giles/Buffy smarm. Giles/Xander smarm. Core Four smarm. Heh. I enjoy making you hate me. Or making you read things that you'd have thought you'd hate just by definition. I've still got this campaign to take every fanfic cliche I can wrap my head around and write it. And make you like it. Can you list the ones I've done already?

I have many story ideas loaded up in my head at the moment. Probably I'm going to have to hold off on all of them until I can fire one at my B/G ficathon assignment, whatever that turns out to be. 21 signups, yay! The ficathon organizer's curse is to always give him or herself the hardest assignment to match; I just have to hope one of the rounds I already have chambered will work for whatever I end up giving myself.

Plus there is another project percolating, a bit longer-term in scope.

Your random link for the day: most wanted and most unwanted music. With recorded examples.

Meme-age, because I am stuck in my hotel room and not yet sleepy at all: If you had me under your command and could make me write anything, regardless of whether or not I know the fandom or if anybody even writes fic in that fandom and no matter how crack-addled it might be, what would you love to see me write?

The word that came to mind when I saw this post about this case this morning was "griefing". That's not a plagiarism case, really. Plagiarism was merely the means the griefer used to troll fandom. The desired payoff was the pages of outraged comments to the stolen story, the proof that the long deception had the desired effect. If you want to frustrate this person, just make him/her go poof from your life: defriend, ban, killfile silently. Interfere with the game's payoff (in the transactional analysis sense).

Don't be another fish in the net.

In other news, I have a signup post ready to fire for the Buffy/Giles ficathon. Am waiting for the second mod of a community to get back to me saying it's okay to use the comm. If I don't have a response by mid-afternoon, I'll just create a new comm. They're cheap, though it would be preferable to use a low-activity comm that everybody is already a member of.

Haven't talked myself out of my software project. Instead have talked husband into it. Ha. Am in the thinking & note-taking stages, but will tip over into some messy implementation soon.

Rainstorm has finally hit us in earnest. Wet and windy. The animals are jibbing when asked to go outside: dog-walks end in sudden U-turns. I am delaying getting out of bed longer than I really should. Sigh.

ETA: Eee! Another nomination: "Breaking Glass" for Fang Fetish round 8.

One of my vacation tasks was to identify things I felt stressed about, and deal with the stressors by either eliminating them from my life or by solving the underlying problem. One set of stressors is the pair of Giles-related comms I inherited from agilesreader.

( Further blather cut to spare your friends pages... )

kambee, you rock. All the giles_watchers posters past, you rock too.

( Had to break out of the cut to say that. )

Okay, I need to retrench. Also, make a plan that is something I can do while keeping all this fun instead of work.

1. No more ficathons. At all. I will write for the 3 I've signed up for, but there will be no more.
2. Next story to reach completion: Giles/Ethan for rounds_of_kink on Sept 9.
3. Then Giles/Ethan for shitsu_tonka. Ethan has a thing or two to say to Angel. And do.
4. Then I finish one series in progress. Come hell or high water, one of them gets written all the way to completion. If necessary, I pick an easy one like "Sigerson Crypt".
5. Covered with virtue, I repeat the triumph with another WIP.
6. gilesxander Octoberfest stories due Oct 16.
7. forty_or_better for Nov 4.
8. Buffy is the Hero, Dammit for Nov 11. Note bad planning.
9. No additional fandom obligations of any kind. The calendar is swept clear for all the writing projects in that scary list.
10. giles_fic_recs needs some love: I need more regular posters. Tuesdays, for instance.

I suspect that what I really need is a real-life vacation. I haven't had one, not really, since I went to London last spring. Will have to wait until Mr P can escape from his job. Hrm.

Okay, I know this is silly. But when I first started reading Buffy fanfic, and consumed all the Giles stories I could find, I found Of Demons And Destiny first. And it remains for me the best Gilesy fic archive. (Riposte runs second.) If it wasn't on one of those two sites, it might as well have not existed for me.

So I'm all wriggly to see that I at last have my very own author page on ODD. It's like I exist now!

Check it: Cory Doctorow writes "In Praise of Fanfic", in Locus magazine:

Writers can't ask readers not to interpret their work. You can't enjoy a novel that you haven't interpreted — unless you model the author's characters in your head, you can't care about what they do and why they do it. And once readers model a character, it's only natural that readers will take pleasure in imagining what that character might do offstage, to noodle around with it. This isn't disrespect: it's active reading.

He also talks about the importance of active, literary fanfic readers & writers to a field that's seeing its readership dwindle. SF has always had less of a wall between amateur and pro anyway. Fans turn into pro writers, and writers stay fans.

We subscribe to Locus but I tend to read it only in chunks when I trip over the Locust stack on a weekend. I note they reviewed a nice Jack Vance collection. Which I won't be purchasing because we subscribed to that enormous reprint-everything-Jack-Vance-wrote project a few years ago, and thus we have it all. Jack Vance is one of my major inspirations as a writer. Anyway, check that, too!

Am finally being useful as a moderator for giles_fic_recs and tagging everything. Thanks to prodding from mireille719, that is. I have now tagged back through the beginning of July 2006. That means only 8 more months of nearly-daily recommendations to tag! And then I get to go through the whole mess again and stick them into memories.

#1 tag: Giles/Buffy.
#2: gen
#3: Giles/Xander tied with Giles/Ethan, though Giles/Wesley is only 1 behind

It's kinda fun to read through all these posts so quickly. Lots of stories, and still lots of them as yet unread. Future pleasures!

I have no joke here. I just like saying that I'm listening to a song titled "Knuddelmaus".

I was just reading a strict little "you may not alter my artwork or display it elsewhere" thing on a site full of images based on Buffy & Angel photos & stills. ( I had to laugh like a hyena. )

Today I'm thinking about Xander a bunch, and how to write a complex & interesting Xander without straying too far from canon, or writing an improbable person. Just read the liz_marcs essay on fanon Xander. I haven't read a lot of Xander fanfic, so I'm not sure what the exact common mistakes are, though I can guess.

I don't really have a problem with straying from canon, so long as the characters are recognizably themselves.

Apparently there is a slowdown in Buffy fandom. The main reason given seems to be that the canon is closed, and it closed in an ucky place for many of the interesting character arcs. I guess this just doesn't affect me. I know what happened in season 7; I am ignoring it. I can ignore more than that! I can pick up my stories in season 3 and just follow that trajectory off, in merry disregard for the rest of canon. Doesn't bug me.

I'm interested in Watchers & Slayers, and in the Council. Canon wasn't, except in an inconsistent, poorly-thought-out, plot devicium sort of way. No problem! I'm heading off this way. Maybe you'll find it interesting...

The Buffyverse stories I want to hear have not yet been told by fanfic. As far as I know.

I'm also thinking about a work bug that is baffling the heck out of me. Though really it's time to switch to new implementation mode for mumble. Bleah. Am at home being hassled by the kitten. Husband is also home, with sore throat. He charmingly shared it with me.